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PAINTER FINISHING ART CENTER WORK

A new painting in honor of the New York State Theater is nearing completion in a 150‐year‐old building that once dealt in another kind of canvas —sails for the ships tied up across the street.

The canvas is 7 feet 8 inches ohigh and 5 feet wide. The paint er, Robert Indiana, warks out of his plainly furnished studio on the top floor of a four‐story walk‐up in one of the few areas of Manhattan not crowded with apartments.

Mr. Indiana likes solitude and is reluctant to divulge his address. But he says he is one of the last Wall Street area art­ists who clustered in the ancient ship chandler and rope walk buildings along the East River after World War II.

His painting will be repro­duced on about 6,000 posters for the Lincoln Center for the, Performing Arts, where the new theater will open soon. They will be distributed to mu­seums, libraries, universities and displayed in such public areas as subway stations. The United States Information Agency will distribute 500 of the posters abroad.

Mr. Indiana observed that the painting might have to be tak­en from its frame and rolled up to get it out of the building. Although his quarters ate spa­cious, the door and stairwell are narrow. His furnishings consist of homemade cabinets and

Scattered about the room were various lengths of poles about a foot in diameter, rem­nants of ship masts that the artist found in the debris of neighborhood buildings. He pointed to the beams of his studio.

“A lot of this wood came from old sailing ships,” he said. “You can tell; it's hand turned.”

From two dormer windows,

“I used to sketch marine scenes,” he said. “I took many designs on ships and funnels as the basis for ideas.”

Mr. Indiana came to his studio eight years ago, not quite a refugee from the demoli­tion of the buildings that stood where Lincoln Center now stands. His studio then was on the spot covered by one of the, columns near the door of the New York State Theater.

“This used to be a sort of Mohtmartre of the art world after World War II,” he said. “Not that it was a Greenwich Village type of neighborhood.

Ever since the year he moved in, the old buildings, some of them dating to the eight­een thirties, have been threat­ened with demolition to make way for new developments.

Mr. Indiana thinks it would be a great loss to change this part of the city.

“I feel isolated,” he said, oblivious of the traffic noises and heliport roar nearby. “It's just as good as working in a barn in New England.”